Carrie Sellman of The Cake Blog does an annual (this being its second year, so I guess it’s officially annual) series called The 12 Cakes of Christmas in which she features 12 different Christmas cakes from 12 different artists. This year, she asked me to create a cake for the series.

Now, there are two directions in which one can go when creating a Christmas-themed cake: the literal route or the interpretive one, and although I like to stray a bit from the beaten path with most of my designs, I went straight-up mainstream with this cake. I was inspired by a few images I found on (where else?) Pinterest, and decided to go for it: American mistletoe, winterberries, kraft hang tags, and gold string. The only difference is that mine were all edible.

My original plan was to go around the base of each tier with the mistletoe, but it began looking very ancient-Greek-Olympic-headpiece, which is fine if you’re doing an ancient-Greek-Olympic-headpiece-themed cake. I, however, was making a Christmas-themed cake, so I scrapped the original design and changed it to more of a mistletoe spray at the front of each tier.